This disclosure relates to a method and system for automatically managing email communication between a group of users and a group of target prospects. Email is ubiquitous, and the application of this is relevant to a large number of fields, but—for the purposes of simplicity—specific examples in this document will be limited to the sales industry.
Managing email relationships with a large number of people (prospects) is central to the role of a sales professional. In many cases, an individual may be reaching out to hundreds of prospects simultaneously. In order to be effective, each individual thread of communication must be maintained and followed up on. Moreover, the response (or lack of response) from a prospect requires action by the sales professional. This could include, but is not limited to, updating data within a Customer Relationship Management system or setting up future follow-up activities. Traditionally, these actions are done manually and require considerable effort on the part of the sales person. In the event of a lack of response from a prospect, the future action of following up can be forgotten or missed—leading to decreased effectiveness and excess labor costs.
In the context of a sales organization involving a large number of sales personnel, coordinating communication across the entirety of the team becomes increasingly important. If a sales professional within an organization is reaching out to an individual, it is desirable to know if anyone else from that organization has reached out to the same individual in order to drive strategy in the sales process. If multiple sales personnel are reaching out the same individual simultaneously, it is important to ensure that both efforts are mutually known and coordinated.
Standard email servers and clients do not provide functionality for multiple inboxes to be synchronized simultaneously nor do they provide the ability to automate actions or consume information based on the data provided by all inboxes within an organization.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system to automate the initial correspondences, bring down emails from all email mailboxes within an organization, and to store and process the data in a manner that enables the automation and efficient display of the data.